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| DOWN UNDER | |
 September 19, 2000  |
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The eyes of the world are on Australia, host nation for this year's Olympic games. Terence Smith talks about the "land down under" with two authors.
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TERENCE SMITH: For Americans, Australia has long been the land of kangaroos, convicts, and crocodile Dundee. Now, of course, it's in the limelight as the land of the summer Olympics. Two writers join us from Sydney to share their vision of life and the people down under. Australian Thomas Keneally is a novelist, a non-fiction writer best-known for "Schindler's List," which won the Booker prize and was made into the academy award-winning movie. His recent books include "The Great Shame" and "The Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World" and the novel "Confederates." American Bill Bryson's latest book is "In A Sunburned Country," an account of his travels through Australia. His earlier books include "A Walk in the Woods" and "Notes From a Small Island." He's down under again covering the Olympics for newspapers in Australia and abroad. |
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| Not just the Australian outback | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Mr. Keneally, can you tell me, when Americans think of this popular image of Australia and Australians, just how wrong are they? THOMAS KENEALLY, Author/Novelist: Well, I think you tend to BILL BRYSON, Author, "In a Sunburned Country:" One of the things that's always appealed to me so much about Australia is that it seems to me that it's just this very attractive kind of fusion of both British and American influences, that it's a place that physically, the cities look very, very much like American places, with skyscrapers. They're modern and so on. But at the same time, the sort of bedrock of the culture here is very British in its orientation -- you know, that they drive on the left, that they drink tea, and they have boxing day, and play cricket, and so on. And to me as an outsider, particularly as an outsider who lived for 20 years in England but grew up in America, it just feels like a really comfortable place. THOMAS KENEALLY: I'm always astonished that right here, within yards of where Bill and I are standing, the penal colony, brought about by the fact that George Washington would no longer take British convicts, the penal colony actually began. We're standing in a highly suburban city, which began as a penal camp. And as an Australian, I'm fascinated by that transformation. Why did it work? It worked because of the environment, I think. But we are the only major city to have such piquant origins. |
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| "A country that has got most things right" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Right. Bill Bryson, I'm curious also about the people, the personality. I'll go out on a limb here and assume they're not all the beer-swilling, crocodile- wrestling, macho types that we tend to put in films.
THOMAS KENEALLY: I'm one of them BILL BRYSON: ...They're not at all. Happily, Australians, many Australians do like to drink, which is part of what appeals to me in this country. And they certainly... they have a very enthusiastic lifestyle. It reminds me very much of Italians in that sense. You know, they're very gregarious and outgoing. They like to go out and party and have a good time. I think that's a very important component of Australian life. But, as Tom says, it's also, you know, a very serious and modern and prosperous, constructive society, as well. TERENCE SMITH: And, in fact, Bill Bryson, you've suggested that it's a society that has got some things right. BILL BRYSON: I've always thought one of the most amazing things about
this country is that... it's extremely hostile environment. Australia
is... is a landscape that once you're there, once you move into the
interior of this country, there is no harsher environment in the inhabited
world. And you started this country with convicts, people who were sent
over here involuntarily. And from that, from this extremely inauspicious
THOMAS KENEALLY: I think that immigrants who came to Australia, like my grandparents, for example, made such a journey from which they could not return, so they had an expectation that things had to work here, that there had to be a dividend to making this tremendous passage through to the other side of the looking glass, through to the upside-down seasons, the upside-down animals, and the upside-down time of Australia, when it's night in the northern world, it's daytime here, and therefore there's a high kind of proletarian explanation of such services as transportation, communication, education, health, and that's still there. The government's trying to erode it. The government has caught Reaganomics in a big way, but it's hard to erode those expectations in the average Australian, I think, Bill. |
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| The aborigines | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: All right. Thomas Keneally, one thing that all of us noticed in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics was the presence not only of Kathy Freeman, but of some 1,100 aborigines in the ceremonies. Is this a time, in your opinion, of reconciliation in Australia? THOMAS KENEALLY: Yes. I think that SOCOG, the organizing committee of the Olympic games were making the gesture that they could in the direction of reconciliation with aboriginals. But, of course, the federal government itself seems niggardly in its approach to this issue. There has never been a treaty, even the kind of schlocky treaties that you guys made with your indigenous. There's never been a treaty between us and them. The principle on which Australia was occupied, was that Australia was terranoius, land belonging to no one. Now we've had two high court decisions that said... that say there was always native title in Australia, and we're adjusting to that. We're adjusting to it in some ways creatively, but at the level of the federal government, I think we're adjusting to it very unimaginatively and in a very niggardly manner. So it will take more than the divine Kathy, as great as she is and as great an athlete, to bring about reconciliation.
BILL BRYSON: Well, the one that Thomas is talking about is, I think, the biggest, certainly the biggest social issue, the question of integrating aboriginal people into mainstream society, if indeed that's what they want. And, you know, I don't think anybody argues with that. If you look at any of the... any measure of human well-being, the indigenous people in Australia always come out on the bottom, in terms of the proportion of people who are in prison, drug abuse, and alcoholism and infant mortality, everything. The aborigines are always on the bottom. Clearly this is something that really, really has to be dealt with. The only other thing that seems to be a great preoccupation at the moment is the health of the Australian dollar - which -- and I'm no economist. I can't offer any kind of suggestions on that, but it certainly seems to be preoccupying an awful lot of people. |
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| Australia's future | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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THOMAS KENEALLY: I think, Bill, we behaved as receptors for a long
time of sophisticated goods, including culture, from distant places,
that arrived by ships. And to an extent, Australians have tended, on
the basis of their enormous resources, to be a cargo culture, to send
TERENCE SMITH: All right. Well, listen, thank you. Thomas Keneally, Bill Bryson, thank you so much for explaining a little something about Australia. BILL BRYSON: Thank you. TERENCE SMITH: Thank you. THOMAS KENEALLY: Thank you. |
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think of us as an outback people, and a people of the bush, and, in
fact, we're one of the most urbanized countries on earth. But then we're
to blame for that projection, because even in the opening ceremony of
the Olympics, we projected images of the bush, of the stockman, the
cowboy, the whip, the sheepdog, the corrugated iron farmhouse. All the
images of the bush came into play in the opening ceremony. So we have
only ourselves to blame. I think also you think of us as pretty much
a British dominion, and generally the cosmopolitan nature of our cities
is something of a surprise to Americans.
BILL
BRYSON: Oh, no, they are. Only joking. Of course, they're not at all...
beginning, they created this country that is safe and orderly and well
run, very, very prosperous, very agreeable. A lot better run in many
ways, I have to say, than our own country. I mean, in terms of providing
universal health care and good-quality education for all, and that sort
of thing, public transport systems and so on, they do it really well.
So it's true what you say. This is a country that has got most things
right. 
TERENCE
SMITH: Bill Bryson, I know from your writing that you are an unabashed
fan of Australia, and yet you know it well enough now perhaps to know
its problems. What are its biggest problems? 
resources off, and to buy them back in more sophisticated forms. And
the question that preoccupies Australians now is, what sort of economy
will we become if we remain a mere shipper out of resources, and not
an inventor? In the last week we had an economist saying, a small country
like Finland has this huge corporation, Nokia. Australia doesn't have
an equivalent industry, and that worries me as an Australian. I don't
know whether we will become, as one politician said, the Portugal of
the south seas. You know, will my grandchildren be cyber scientists,
or will they be waiters? That's been the big question.